Global Policy Forum

By Steven Erlanger

As the European Union moves inexorably toward completion, Europeans are awakening to a less sovereign, less comfortable world, prompting the kind of anxiety among the elderly and the poor that continues to feed the growth of the far right.

The strong showing of the French neo-fascist, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in the first round of France's presidential election seemed a new endorsement of the racism and xenophobia that the 73-year-old has been pressing for 30 years. Though sure to lose to Jacques Chirac in today's final round, Mr. Le Pen has created an earthquake.

His anti-crime and anti-immigration themes have found echoes across Europe, from Austria and Italy to Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany. But Mr. Le Pen is also tapping into a new anxiety about the loss of national identity, made more acute by the prospect of Europeanization and globalization, which he combines to call "Euro-globalization."

By tying this frightening new world to American actions, Mr. Le Pen is planting ground prepared for him nicely, with fertilizer and nutrients, by France's left, with its complaints about "Coca-colonization," McDonald's and genetically modified food.

"There is a deep concern over issues of personal and national identity in which the hard right is rooted," said Simon Serfaty, director of European studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "People feel an invisible invasion: too many immigrants, the European Union, the intrusion of American culture."

Europeans are discovering that as the European Union completes itself — both geographically, as it absorbs nations of the former Soviet bloc, and institutionally, with its large library of laws and shared currency — the nation-state for which so many of their parents and grandparents fought and died is itself dying.

The European Union was born out of the cataclysm of World War II, to save the nation-state. But the concept of union is now inescapable. "Europeans are recycling the nation-states into member-states, which will have to keep to a discipline that will deny them the national sovereignty for which they fought so many wars in the past," Mr. Serfaty said.

Tied to all that change is an anxiety that swells from the bottom: that Brussels will not take care of its citizens as gently and lovingly as the national capitals have in the past.

Faceless European institutions now define national monetary policy and regulate what people drive, what is safe to eat, even how they dispose of their garbage.

Added to these sacrifices of traditional liberty, of course, is the phenomenon of immigration, with the citizens of the colonial empires Europe fought to create now returning to the metropole — but darker, younger, poorer. This becomes wrapped up in an increased and hardly illegitimate fear of crime, which itself becomes tied to the fear of Muslim terrorism that followed Sept. 11, linking terrorism and foreigners.

The main question for Europeans, Mr. Serfaty said, is "how do you become something different without being turned into something else, or something less?"

Europe's major parties have had little to say to this anxiety, said Christoph Bertram, director of the Institute for International Affairs and Security, which advises the German government.

"It's political correctness, but we're not airing issues like immigration and crime," said Mr. Bertram. He pointed to the large numbers of Europeans who say politics is not relevant to their lives. "The establishment pretends that these are not serious issues, or if you raise them you side with the unwashed and the fascists."

Exploiting a general disappointment with Europe's mainstream politicians, evident in the lower voter turnout, Mr. Le Pen and others who have modernized their fascism, like Jí¶rg Haider of Austria and Pim Fortuyn of the Netherlands, have made extraordinary showings in percentage terms. Mr. Haider drew 27 percent in 1999; Mr. Fortuyn polled more than 34 percent in local elections in Rotterdam, and is expected to win 20 of 150 seats in Parliament in elections May 15.

Mr. Haider, Mr. Le Pen and others have discussed forming a pan-European party to counter the European Union, a threat centrist politicians are taking seriously.

Timothy Garton Ash, an Oxford-based historian, sees Europe's "greatest single failure" in its inability "to integrate immigrants from the European periphery as European citizens." The correlation between the Le Pen vote and the percentage of "non-E.U. foreigners" in France, displayed by Le Monde in a color map, is startling. Europe's greatest challenge, beyond job creation, Mr. Garton Ash said, "is coming up with our own European notion of the American dream."

For Mark Hunter, a researcher at Insead, a business school in Fontainebleau, France, Mr. Le Pen's success is partly explained by the failure of mainstream politicians of left or right to have any serious answer to crime and immigration. Worse, he said, "the left has been hammering for years on the menace to French culture and identity of American culture." By doing so, "the left helped legitimize the idea that French culture is in danger of disappearing, and this has helped to legitimize the discourse of the French far right. The National Front has explicitly made the connection."

Mr. Le Pen argues that French culture is at risk from American ideas, spawned by a "mongrel nation," being adopted by the European Union.

The left was supposed to have answers for the working class. But with the collapse of Communism and the left's move to the center — as in Britain — the left has run out of ideological gas.

For Christopher Patten, the foreign-policy commissioner for the European Union, the challenge of the far right requires a serious pan-European answer. "If politics doesn't seem to have a purpose, you leave a vacuum into which people with simple solutions and xenophobes can slip," he said. "We need to ensure that the institutions we create Europe-wide are properly democratic and accountable, so people feel they own them."

But for many of Europe's disenchanted, attracted by the far right, Mr. Patten — urbane and unelected — is the disease for which he purports to be the cure.

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